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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance

While 10B-level industrial foundation models have pushed the boundaries of image inpainting, their prohibitive computational costs severely hinder practical deployment. Constructing a highly optimized task-specific specialist offers a promising solution; however, extreme structural compression inevitably triggers a severe representation bottleneck. To conquer this, we propose Moebius, a highly efficient lightweight inpainting framework. We systematically reconstruct the diffusion backbone by introducing the Local-$\lambda$ Mix Interaction ($L\lambda MI$) block. Comprising Local-$\lambda$ and Interactive-$\lambda$ modules, it elegantly summarizes spatial contexts and global semantic priors into fixed-size linear matrices, preserving complex latent interactions while drastically shedding parameters. Furthermore, to unlock the full representational capacity of this highly compact architecture, we synergistically pair it with an adaptive multi-granularity distillation strategy. Operating strictly within the latent space to avoid expensive pixel-space decoding, this strategy dynamically balances multiple gradient-based losses to achieve high-fidelity alignment. Extensive experiments across natural and portrait benchmarks demonstrate that this optimal synergy enables Moebius to rival or even surpass the generation quality of the 10B-level industrial generalist FLUX.1-Fill-Dev. Remarkably, Moebius achieves this using less than 2\% of the parameters (0.22B vs. 11.9B) while delivering a $>15\times$ acceleration in total inference time, setting a new efficiency standard for high-fidelity inpainting. Project page at https://hustvl.github.io/Moebius.

02.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

TranscriptFormer: A generative cell atlas across 1.5 billion years of evolution | Science

作者: 未知作者

Single-cell transcriptomics is revolutionizing our understanding of cellular diversity, yet comparing transcriptional programs across the tree of life remains challenging. We developed TranscriptFormer, a family of generative foundation models trained on up to 112 million cells spanning 1.53 billion years of evolution across 12 species. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on cell type classification, even for species separated over 685 million years of evolution, and zero-shot disease state identification in human cells. Developmental trajectories, phylogenetic relationships and cellular hierarchies emerge naturally in TranscriptFormer’s representations without any explicit training on these annotations. This work establishes a powerful framework for quantitative single-cell analysis and comparative cellular biology, thus demonstrating that universal principles of cellular organization can be learned and predicted across the tree of life.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Guide to Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects in Competing Risks Settings

arXiv:2606.18281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) are central to treatment decision-making in personalized medicine. In competing risks settings, estimating CATEs from survival data allows for patient-specific assessments of treatment effectiveness for a specific event of interest while properly accounting for alternative event types. This distinction is essential in the presence of comorbidities, where competing causes of death may otherwise confound the therapeutic benefit. Focusing on right-censored survival times with binary treatment, we examine CATEs defined as covariate-conditional differences in the absolute risk for the event of interest at a fixed time. To this end, we study meta-learners which adapt machine learning algorithms for CATE estimation in competing risks scenarios. We systematically compare six meta-learners, combining Cox regression or random survival forests for risk modeling with elastic net regression or random forests for direct CATE modeling. To provide practical guidance on model selection, we evaluate their performance in multiple simulation settings, that differ in hazard complexity, treatment heterogeneity, treatment assignment, event type distribution and censoring. To facilitate applied use, we provide the R package, crsurvlearners, which implements all considered approaches.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Definition of Good Explanations and the Challenges Explaining LLM Outputs

arXiv:2606.14838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How to define a good explanation is a long-standing philosophical debate which has found recent renewed interest in the context of AI outputs. Explainability is crucial for AI adoption in many contexts, but in order to produce good explanations of AI systems, we must first have an understanding of what good explanations are. In this paper we propose a definition inspired by the notion of counterfactual explanations, however we argue that one must also take into account the interlocutor's prior beliefs in each fact that could be offered in an explanation. We explore the ramifications of this definition for AI explainability and, in particular, why LLM outputs are difficult to produce good explanations for.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Learn-to-learn on Arbitrary Textual Conditioning: A Hypernetwork-Driven Meta-Gated LLM

Conventional LLMs may suffer from corpus heterogeneity and subtle condition changes. While finetuning can create the catastrophe forgetting issue, application of meta-learning on LLMs is also limited due to its complexity and scalability. In this paper, we activate the meta-signal of $\beta$ within the SwiGLU blocks, resulting in a meta-gating mechanism that adaptively adjusts the nonlinearity of FFN. A hypernetwork is employed which dynamically produces $\beta$ on textual conditions, providing meta-controllability on LLMs. By testing on different condition types such as task, domain, persona, and style, our method outperforms finetuning and meta-learning baselines, and can generalize reasonably on unseen tasks, condition types, or instructions. Our code can be found in https://github.com/AaronJi/MeGan.

06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Leveraging Energy Features for Surface Classification with Deep Learning: A Comparative Analysis Across Three Independent Datasets

arXiv:2606.18698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The energy-based method remains a comparatively underexamined approach for surface classification in mobile robotics, despite promising results in constrained environments. This study evaluated the viability of using energy-derived features as either a standalone classification modality or as supplementary input to inertial data. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted across three publicly available datasets, comparing the performance of modern deep learning architectures including recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, encoder-only transformers, and Mamba state-space models, under automated hyperparameter tuning and input sequence length optimization. The models achieved higher accuracy than previously reported values on all evaluated datasets, with the convolutional neural network yielding the highest overall performance. When relying exclusively on energy-based features, the models attained classification accuracies in the range of 85-90%, approximately 5-10% lower than those achieved when combined with inertial features (96-99%). Augmenting inertial data with energy features resulted in a consistent mean accuracy improvement of 1-2%. These findings indicate that classifiers relying solely on energy features offer sufficient accuracy for standalone deployment, while also providing a consistent gain when used in combination with other sensing modalities.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Distilling Drifting Transformers with Representation Autoencoders

arXiv:2606.15553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) have improved diffusion and flow models by semantically richer latent space owing to the strongly label-wise clustered DINO features in the pretrained encoders. Yet in the distillation stage, the severe anisotropy and large curvatures caused by the rich semantic representations would hinder the convergence and performance, making the trajectory-based distillation unstable. In this work, we argue that the RAE latent space is compatible with distillation via the newly proposed Drifting Models. We first quantitatively study the curvatures and isotropy statistics across different autoencoders, and theoretically reveal that Drifting Model itself is highly likely to fail on extremely scattered spaces like reconstruction-based VAEs. These motivate us to apply the drifting paradigm directly to representation autoencoders. Our proposed method, Drift-RAE, distills pretrained flow models in RAE latent spaces using Drifting, together with insightful modifications that improve training stability by thereotically aligning drifting fields with other frameworks. Regarding the experimental evidences, we achieve 1.77 FID on ImageNet 256 dataset using only 10k distillation steps, surpassing state-of-the-art RAE distillation methods and appearing comparative with the original Drifting Model without requiring an auxiliary MAE feature extractor. The code will be made publicly available.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

scIsoAgent enables autonomous isoform-resolved characterization and sequence-informed interpretation of long-read single-cell transcriptomes

Alternative isoform usage can alter gene function independently of total gene expression, creating a need to resolve transcript isoforms at single-cell resolution. Long-read single-cell RNA sequencing meets this need by linking cellular identity to transcript isoforms and sequence-level features. Realizing its full biological value requires reproducible workflows that connect specialized long-read analysis with biological interpretation. Existing large language model (LLM)-based biomedical agents support general omics analysis, but are not designed for isoform-resolved long-read single-cell workflows. Here, we present scIsoAgent, an autonomous LLM-powered scientific agent for long-read single-cell RNA-seq analysis. scIsoAgent turns heterogeneous long-read single-cell inputs into traceable isoform-resolved workflows, using stage-aware planning and persistent computational context to support both execution and interpretation. Across complementary evaluations, this design improved the continuity from analysis planning to executable, interactive workflows compared with general-purpose LLM baselines. In real-data reanalysis, scIsoAgent recovered major findings from published long-read single-cell resources and extended a representative differential transcript usage event into a sequence-informed functional hypothesis. By linking full-length isoform sequences with model-inferred transcript properties, scIsoAgent connects observed isoform usage with potential sequence-level functional consequences. These results demonstrate that autonomous scientific agents can transform fragmented long-read single-cell analysis into coherent, reproducible workflows for isoform-resolved discovery and biological interpretation.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

What Uncertainties Do We Need for Dynamical Systems?

arXiv:2606.11988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The distinction between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty has received considerable attention in machine learning research, mainly in the context of supervised learning but also in other settings such as generative modeling. In this paper, we offer a machine learning perspective on uncertainty modeling for dynamical systems, which has been studied much less so far. In particular, we ask: what uncertainties do we need for dynamical systems? We discuss sources of uncertainty, clarify their nature (aleatoric or epistemic), and consider how the objectives of representing and quantifying uncertainty vary across different tasks.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Improving Alignment Between Human and Machine Codes: An Empirical Assessment of Prompt Engineering for Construct Identification in Psychology

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies – codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Geometric Deep Learning Reveals Ligandable and Cryptic RNA Binding Small Molecule Pockets (SMARTPocket)

RNAs are important therapeutic targets, however identifying ligandable small-molecule binding pockets remains a major barrier to RNA-targeted drug discovery. Here, SMARTPocket, an atomic-level geometric deep learning framework for predicting RNA-small molecule binding pockets directly from three-dimensional structure is introduced. SMARTPocket represents RNA as full-atom point clouds and uses transfer learning from more than 110,000 protein binding interface structures to overcome the limited number of experimentally elucidated RNA-ligand complexes. Across four established single-chain benchmarks and three broader curated benchmarks, SMARTPocket consistently outperforms existing RNA pocket predictors and general biomolecular modeling approaches. The model generalizes to apo RNA structures when conformational changes are modest, identifies cryptic ligandable pockets, and recapitulates experimentally validated binding sites in the SARS-CoV-2 frameshifting element and an RNA aptamer evolved to bind small molecules. SMARTPocket-guided docking further improves near-native RNA-ligand pose recovery and computational efficiency compared with blind docking. These results establish SMARTPocket as a generalizable framework for structure-based identification of ligandable RNA pockets and for accelerating discovery of RNA-targeted small molecules.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Illumination-Robust Camera-Based Heart-Rate Estimation for Physiological Sensing in Robots

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbf{\beta}$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbf{\beta}=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Comprehensive Survey of Medical Image Segmentation: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Beyond

Medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnostics, treatment planning, disease monitoring, and neurological disorder identification. This article presents a comprehensive review of its systematic development, covering widely used public datasets, representative methods built on the U-Net, Transformer, and SAM architectures, and key evaluation metrics with their differences, followed by an analysis of major challenges from multiple perspectives. Unlike surveys that focus on a single model family or a specific clinical application, this review organizes U-Net-, Transformer-, and SAM-based methods within a unified analytical framework, with a particular focus on their effectiveness in improving segmentation accuracy and efficiency. This work aims to guide future research and support clinical translation of medical image segmentation, with all related resources publicly available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/andrew-pengyu/Awsome_MedSeg/tree/main.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the structure of the sandpile identity element on Sierpinski gasket graphs

arXiv:2603.12006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the identity of the abelian sandpile group of finite approximation graphs of the Sierpinski gasket, and we show that the second-order term in the scaling limit converges to the path distance to the nearest corner on the Sierpinski gasket. The proof relies on a decomposition of the identity of the sandpile group into the sum of a constant function and the Laplacian of the graph distance on the approximating graphs.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Deterministic Integrity Gates for LLM-Assisted Clinical Manuscript Preparation: An Auditable Biomedical Informatics Architecture

arXiv:2606.09500v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As autonomous research agents and AI co-scientist systems push large language models (LLMs) from drafting toward end-to-end manuscript production, the bottleneck shifts from generation to verification. Fluent LLM output can hide fabricated citations, numbers that drift from source tables, and unmet reporting-guideline items; existing tools generate without verifying, and self-critique inherits the blind spots that produce confident fabrication. We describe an architecture pairing generation with verification, resting on three principles: decompose the workflow into self-contained skills, gate every stage transition with halt-on-failure, and resolve each integrity question with the cheapest sufficient mechanism, a deterministic, re-executable check where one suffices and a prose-level probe only where interpretation is unavoidable. This determinism-where-possible split, organized as an integrity-gate taxonomy, is the core contribution. It is realized as MedSci Skills, an open-source toolkit of 43 skills with a 21-detector deterministic tier, evaluated on three public-dataset pipelines (STARD, PRISMA, STROBE) and a seeded-defect ablation. Across the three pipelines every content-hash manifest verified clean and the gates surfaced real defects; on 27 identical injected defects the deterministic gates detected all 27 with no false positives on the matched clean fixtures, whereas a single-prompt LLM reviewer detected 11, its misses in code, bibliography, and style defects the prose hides. Determinism-where-possible verification yields an auditable, re-executable trail that exposes the evidence a human needs to check an LLM-assisted manuscript: feasibility and reproducibility evidence, not a claim of human-competitive quality, which a separate blinded study addresses. MedSci Skills is MIT-licensed and archived (v3.8.0).

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Developmental Associations Linking Childhood Trauma and Early Cannabis Use to Adolescent DNA Methylation and Psychotic-Like Experiences

Background. Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) index early risk for psychotic disorders and are consistently associated with childhood trauma, yet underlying biological mechanisms remain poorly understood. DNA methylation (DNAm) may capture the biological embedding of early adversity, while adolescent exposures such as cannabis use may modify these processes. We examined epigenome-wide associations of childhood trauma and PLEs, tested the moderating role of early cannabis use, and evaluated DNAm as a potential mediator. Methods. We analysed data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a UK population-based birth cohort. Childhood trauma was assessed prospectively and retrospectively. Epigenome-wide DNAm was measured in peripheral blood at ~17 years using the Illumina 450K array, and PLEs were assessed at 18 using a structured interview. Epigenome-wide association studies were conducted for trauma-DNAm and DNAm-PLEs associations in the final sample (n = 1,457), adjusting for demographic, biological, and technical covariates. Differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were identified using DMRff, followed by functional enrichment analyses. Cannabis use at 15.5 was modelled as a moderator with multiple imputation for missing data. Mediation was tested using the Divide-Aggregate Composite-null Test (DACT). Results. Childhood trauma was associated with widespread DNAm differences, primarily at the regional level, with enrichment in pathways related to cellular stress responses. In contrast, DNAm associated with PLEs was more limited and implicated loci involved in epigenetic regulatory processes. These signatures were largely distinct, and there was no evidence supporting mediation after multiple testing correction. Incorporating cannabis use altered the pattern and extent of DNAm associations, with stronger and more significant signals observed at both CpG and regional levels, although these did not translate into evidence of mediation. Conclusion. Childhood trauma and PLEs show distinct DNAm signatures in adolescence, with trauma-related DNAm reflecting broad stress-related processes and PLE-associated DNAm implicating regulatory mechanisms. We found little evidence that DNAm mediates the trauma-PLE association. Instead, adolescent exposures, particularly cannabis use, may distinctly influence trauma-related epigenetic variation with limited detectable downstream effects on PLEs. These findings support a context-dependent model of epigenetic risk and highlight the need for larger longitudinal studies to clarify causal pathways linking early adversity to psychosis.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Mind the Perspective: Let's Reason Recursively for Theory of Mind

arXiv:2606.11724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning requires inferring agents' beliefs from partial and asymmetric observations, which remains an open challenge for LLMs. Existing prompting-based approaches improve ToM reasoning through observable-event filtering or temporal belief chains, without explicitly modeling nested beliefs. We introduce RecToM, an inference-time framework for ToM reasoning that models nested beliefs via recursive perspective construction. RecToM constructs each character perspective from the preceding character perspective along the character chain specified by the question, reducing higher-order belief questions to actual-world questions within the final constructed perspective. We further provide a KD45 analysis showing that RecToM's perspective construction induces a well-formed belief modality beyond simple event filtering. Experiments on ToM benchmarks, including Hi-ToM, Big-ToM, and FanToM, across multiple LLM backbones show that RecToM consistently outperforms recent advanced approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, RecToM reaches 100\% accuracy on Hi-ToM with GPT-5.4 and Qwen3.5, a benchmark requiring higher-order ToM reasoning.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Micro-macro population dynamics models of benthic algae with long-memory decay and generic growth

arXiv:2505.04289v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benthic algae as a primary producer in riverine ecosystems develop biofilms on the riverbed. Their population dynamics involve growth and decay processes, the former owing to the balance between biological proliferation and mortality, while the latter to mechanical abrasion because of the transport of sediment particles. Contrary to the assumptions of previous studies, the decay has experimentally been found to exhibit long-memory behavior, where the population decreases at an algebraic rate. However, the origin and mathematical theory of this phenomenon remain unresolved. The objective of this study is to introduce a novel mathematical model employing spin processes to describe microscopic biofilm dynamics. A spin process is a continuous-time jump process transitioning between states 0 and 1, and the continuum limit of these processes captures the long-memory decay and generates generic growth. The proposed framework leverages heterogeneous spin rates, achieved by appropriately superposing spin processes with distinct rates, to reproduce the long-memory decay. Computational simulations demonstrate the behavior of the model, particularly emphasizing rate-induced tipping phenomena. This mathematical model provides a computationally tractable interpretation of benthic algae dynamics and their long-term prediction, relevant to river-engineering applications.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model for Standard View Classification of Echocardiographic Videos

Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available echocardiography video dataset. Using EV9V, we systematically benchmark representative video classification architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream CNN-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The proposed framework leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across diverse video classification models, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware spatio-temporal learning for echocardiographic view classification. The code is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Global and local genetic overlap among ME/CFS, irritable bowel syndrome and psychiatric traits: a hypothesis-generating analysis

作者:

Background. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) frequently co-occur following infection, yet shared genetic architecture at the locus level has not been systematically characterised. Aims. To estimate global and local genetic correlations between ME/CFS (including infection-onset subgroup), IBS, major depressive disorder (MDD) and loneliness/isolation, and characterise ME/CFS cell-type heritability enrichment. Method. GWAS summary statistics: DecodeME (15,579 ME/CFS; 9,738 infection-onset), FinnGen R9 (9,296 IBS), PGC MDD Wave 2 (45,396) and UK Biobank loneliness (N=455,364). LDSC for global correlations; LAVA for local correlations across 2,495 loci; MAGMA for cell-type enrichment (Descartes Human atlas); coloc.abf for colocalisation. Results. All pairwise global correlations were significant after Bonferroni correction, including ME/CFS-all-MDD (rg=0.598, 95% CI 0.46-0.74) and ME/CFS-all-IBS (rg=0.573, 0.39-0.75). Of 4,232 local tests, 16 reached FDR

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

ProMiSE: Protein Multi-State Evaluation Benchmark in Biological Contexts

Proteins are inherently dynamic, with biological functions often emerging from transitions between multiple conformational states. While recent breakthroughs have largely addressed the static structure prediction problem, no systematic benchmark exists to demonstrate how well current models capture functionally relevant dynamics. We introduce ProMiSE, the first benchmark that provides both a dataset and an evaluation scheme, based on native biological assemblies and integrating major conformational change mechanisms - intrinsic, ligand-induced, and protein-induced - within a single curated dataset. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art structure prediction models, including AlphaFold3 and recent generative approaches. Our findings reveal that current models exhibit a limited ability to sample intrinsic multi-states and are often insensitive to biological context in induced scenarios. Internal representation analysis suggests that training-data exposure can shift predictions toward dominant conformational states over alternative biologically relevant states, primarily at the structure module. In contrast, results from BioEmu indicate that reducing decoding-stage bias can substantially improve multi-state sampling without major changes to upstream pair representations.

22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-12

Social contact patterns in the United Kingdom following the COVID-19 pandemic: The Reconnect cross-sectional survey

by Lucy Goodfellow, Billy J. Quilty, Kevin van Zandvoort, W. John Edmunds Background Close-contact and respiratory infectious diseases are spread through social interactions. Measuring these interactions has transformed our ability to understand transmission and control these infections. Social contact patterns were disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic and have been affected by wider demographic, cultural, and workplace changes since then. Methods and findings To estimate post-pandemic social contact patterns in the United Kingdom, we conducted a cross-sectional social contact survey from November 2024 to March 2025 on a nationally representative sample of participants. Interactions were captured by age, gender, and across socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnic groups. We calculated the mean number of daily contacts and contact matrices, stratified by variables of interest, using a negative binomial regression model weighted by age, gender, ethnic group, and weekday/weekend. 13,238 participants were recruited, 3,019 of whom were aged under 18 years old; survey response rates were 36% and 27% for adults and children, respectively. The mean number of daily contacts was 9.1 (95% confidence interval (CI): 8.7, 9.5); this figure was 13.8 (95% CI: 12.8, 14.9) for children, and 7.8 (95% CI: 7.4, 8.2) for adults. Higher numbers of contacts were positively associated with employment, household income, and educational qualifications held. Contact matrices showed high levels of age-assortativity, as well as inter-generational contacts in the home. Contacts were assortative between ethnic groups and SES in all settings; this effect was strongest between ethnic groups in the home, and between SES in the workplace. We constructed socially-stratified next-generation matrices for a novel respiratory pathogen, projecting that the majority White ethnic group would account for the largest share of new infections (76.7% (95% CI: 75.5, 77.9) of cases), but that per-capita infection risk would disproportionately affect minority ethnic groups, with the risk for the Black population being 2.27 (95% CI: 2.06, 2.51) times that of the White population. This study may be limited by the inherent recall biases and reporting fatigue involved with self-reporting contacts. Conclusions This study provides crucial data to inform post-pandemic mathematical models of infectious disease transmission, and allows ethnicity and SES to be incorporated in such models.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Context-Aware Multimodal Claim Verification in Spoken Dialogues

Every day, millions absorb claims from podcasts and streams that no fact-checker ever sees. Spoken misinformation is built through conversation, where credibility comes not from facts alone but from how claims are framed, reinforced, or left unchallenged across turns. Yet fact-checking has focused on isolated text, leaving dialogue audio under-studied. We introduce MAD2, a new Multi-turn Audio Dialogues benchmark for spoken claim verification, containing 1,000 two-speaker dialogues with 3,368 check-worthy claims and approximately 10 hours of audio, and propose calibrated multimodal fusion of a context-aware audio encoder and a dialogue-aware text model. Across settings, adding dialogue context improves verification, but the gains depend on scenario type. Using only preceding context often matches offline performance, supporting live-moderation settings, and audio contributes most when transcript-based models are destabilized by additional context. Overall, conversational structure matters more for verification than misinformation framing.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Cross-Domain Multi-Person Human Activity Recognition via Near-Field Wi-Fi Sensing

Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition (HAR) provides substantial convenience and has emerged as a thriving research field, yet the coarse spatial resolution inherent to Wi-Fi significantly hinders its ability to distinguish multiple subjects. By exploiting the near-field domination effect, establishing a dedicated sensing link for each subject through their personal Wi-Fi device offers a promising solution for multi-person HAR under native traffic. However, due to the subject-specific characteristics and irregular patterns of near-field signals, HAR neural network models require fine-tuning (FT) for cross-domain adaptation, which becomes particularly challenging with certain categories unavailable. In this paper, we propose WiAnchor, a novel training framework for efficient cross-domain adaptation in the presence of incomplete activity categories. This framework processes Wi-Fi signals embedded with irregular time information in three steps: during pre-training, we enlarge inter-class feature margins to enhance the separability of activities; in the FT stage, we innovate an anchor matching mechanism for cross-domain adaptation, filtering subject-specific interference informed by incomplete activity categories, rather than attempting to extract complete features from them; finally, the recognition of input samples is further improved based on their feature-level similarity with anchors. We construct a comprehensive dataset to thoroughly evaluate WiAnchor, achieving over 90% cross-domain accuracy with absent activity categories.